Hair brushes have been used for thousands of years in an attempt to groom hair. In the grooming process, bristles projecting from a hair brush are forced toward the scalp in an attempt to cause individual hairs to either fall into place, or to align with each other somewhat.
However common experience indicates that conventional hair brushing is not always successful. For example, individual hairs frequently refuse to closely align closely with each other. One explanation may be that scales on the individual hair shafts can project outward, which prevents adjacent hairs from being forced into close alignment; the projecting scales simply get in the way.
While hair brushing can be stimulating to the scalp, brushing per se does not always achieve a well groomed appearance, and accomplishes little or nothing with respect to cleaning or conditioning the hair. While sufficiently large foreign particles, e.g., dirt, dandruff, may be brushed out of the hair, smaller particles can remain in place on the hair shafts or hair scales. Brushing one's hair truly does not provide conditioning in that after brushing the hair frequently is as it was before, give or take some mechanical repositioning of the hairs.
It is known in the art to produce an air flow electro-kinetically by directly converting electrical power into a flow of air without mechanically moving components. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,789,801 to Lee (1988), depicted herein in simplified form as FIGS. 1A and 1B. Lee's system 10 provides a first array of small area ("minisectional") electrodes 20 is spaced-apart symmetrically from a second array of larger area ("maxisectional") electrodes 30, with a high voltage (e.g., 5 KV) pulse generator 40 coupled between the two arrays. Generator 40 outputs high voltage pulses that ionize the air between the arrays, producing an air flow 50 from the minisectional array toward the maxisectional array results. The high voltage field present between the two arrays can release ozone (O.sub.3), which can advantageously safely destroy many types of bacteria if excessive quantities of ozone are not released.
Unfortunately, Lee's tear-shaped maxisectional electrodes are relatively expensive to fabricate, most likely requiring mold-casting or extrusion processes. Further, air flow and ion generation efficiency is not especially high using Lee's configuration.
There is a need for a hair brush that can not only brush hair, but provide a measure of cleaning and/or conditioning as well. Preferably such hair brush should subject the hair being brushed to an ion flow to promote cleaning and grooming.
The present invention provides such a grooming brush.